Saturday, January 7, 2012

Google Plus and the Next Frontier

I've been around a while and I have seen a lot of trends
come and go as far as online life is concerned. I remember when that whole
World Wide Web came about and I used a program called Mosaic 1.0 to look at the
40 or 50 websites that were out there. I would subscribe to the Usenet groups
using Free Agent and wait a half hour to download nudie pictures, and somewhere
along the lines I remember downloading a program called Mirc so that I could
play around in Internet Relay Chat. Seriously I thought I was in the Jetsons
times back then, and I was perfectly happy with how the world was going along.

Well later on down the road a program called Netscape came
along, and it was bringing more toys to the web browsing experience. My one
friend with a Macintosh {dork} was raving about it so I had to try it. Yeah it
was new, and then came a program called ICQ which all of my IRC friends were
using, and that was the coolest thing in the world. I could actually send
instant messages to people and it would make a noise when one of my friends was
at the computer. If you are reasonably new to the whole internet game, you are
probably thinking that I am one of those relics talking about the days of World
War I or something, but no I just haven’t started waxing on about Commodore and
Atari yet.

I’ve seen a lot of it come and a lot of it go and I have
come to know when it is coming and when it is going. These days it is all about
social networking, and let me tell you I have seen all of that disappear and reappear
too. I have frolicked in most of it until it bored me and then I simply watched
it bore everyone else and go away. Remember that juggernaut known as Myspace? I
assure you that when I stopped paying attention to Myspace a lot of people stopped
paying attention to me, and thought I was nuts. Now there was something cool
about Myspace but it really got old fast, and by “old fast” I mean that the
entire system started seeming outdated daily. Other services came along and
started just being better from the get go, and chief among them is the Facebook
that everyone and their mother uses now.

Social Media has some fringe elements that might stay valid
on their own for some time to come {like LinkedIn} and many other BBS style
online communities that have popped up and simply follow the leaders as best
they can, but it really in the last year came down to two big services and two
formats. You have the Facebook and Twitter, both of which I have used and to
varying success. I actually started writing this because of the third big
player that is going to challenge these two and in the end crush one of them
outright, if Google doesn’t get bored with it. You see that is still the caveat
that comes with throwing your heart and soul into the new kid in the online
world Google + is in the fact that our friends at Google might just one day
decide they don’t like supporting Google + anymore and up and dump it. While it
is still there let me just explain why Google + will inevitably crush Facebook
and compliment Twitter.

You’ll forgive me but I am a Tweeter at heart and I can
still have a fun time spending an hour or so before I go to bed funning around
on Twitter. It’s basically the format of it, and it is easy access to news,
friends, and one liners. As long as they keep that track nobody is going to
destroy it, not even Google, and trust me they tried with the whole Google Buzz
thing {that they got bored with} and with Google + they decided it was time to
take on Facebook. As someone who watches Facebook deal with its own innate fear
of becoming irrelevant like Myspace, I have to say that it couldn’t come at a
better time. Facebook used to work really good, then came the developmental
stages which give everyone fits. You get used to the developments just to find
out that you hate the way it works afterwards, and wish it would go back, and
the dirty little secret is that it never will. I found myself wondering quite
often what was wrong with me, as I watched what little popularity I had fade,
and then worse than that started realizing that the worst thing you could do
was interact with the people on my Facebook because you would be inundated with
their friends opinions. Some of these were good and a lot of them were time
wasting babble, and inside jokes and words from the clique.

This didn’t help as Facebook goes through a never ending
process of algorithms to edit how other people’s information gets fed to you.
Most of the things you would like to see are filtered out and the crap comes
shining through a lot of the time. I will never understand why this is so
important to Facebook but it is. They finally started feeling the heat from
Google + and it’s “follow based” model that mimics Twitter and started the
whole Subscription and Fan system. This of course puts another layer of crap in
your feed that makes it harder to interact with actual friends and people that
will interact back with you and the cycle of the never ending middle school
continues. I have yet to find this problem occurring on Google + but who knows
what will come later.

If you’re like me and you are seeing the frustration of
Facebook then I have a few tips to get you over to Google + with the least
amount of withdrawal. You see with the use of Google Chrome there are some
interesting little apps that will get your Facebook updates {and your Twitter
too} in your feed, and make it so that everything you post on Google + go right
over to Facebook and Twitter. The first one I found was called SGPlus {http://sgplus.me/}
which after you install it will let you selectively post to Facebook and
Twitter at the same time but will also add these feeds to your Google + feed.
After I had gotten used to that I also found Plusist {http://plusist.com/}
which doesn’t require any interaction on my part, it just simply checks my
Google + page every half hour and then posts whatever is new to Facebook and
Twitter. It also works as a great way to post to Twitter long things with a
link to your Google + article that you posted, and has upped my Twitter
interactions by quite a bit. Of course it has come pretty close to adding no
value to my Facebook, which has inevitably become valueless to me anyway.

Now of course on Google + they are playing around with
adding things to your feed that they think might “interest you” that aren’t in
your follows, but this is not in lieu of the people and things you want
information from. Instead at the end of the pertinent feed, there is a separate
scrawl of “trending” where these things come in, and even though it hasn’t been
100% accurate on what I want to see in my case it has added entertainment
value. It’s even added Barack Obama feeds that have been the source of great
ridicule that I might have otherwise missed, as well as some good eggs I just
might have wanted to follow. All in all though the interactions on Google + are
more along the lines of what I had once found to be the case on Facebook, so in
the end rather than sitting around wishing for “the good old days” I have moved
onward. I really do hope that Google doesn’t get sick of + or at the very least
doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel every week, in a manner that will make me
sick of it.

I have been bouncing around online for just about 20 years, so I have been there and have done that. It doesn't mean I didn't like it and wouldn't do it again. As most humans, I am a social animal. To be a social animal on the internet it is social media that binds us all together. I prefer Google + and Twitter but have pages on the other ones that I ignore, so you probably should too.

My Blogging

I blog a lot. If you don't like people that blog a lot then I don't know how you got here to begin with. You may want to just move along.

Contrary to popular opinion I hate politics, but have political opinions ..

The easiest way to get under my skin is to apply the "all you talk about is politics" tag. This is a common knee jerk reaction some have when they see something political, and unfortunately I don't hold back sometimes. As a matter of fact, I share more about health, fitness and blogging than politics, which you would know if you weren't busy dismissing me. I actually follow and interact with more people that disagree with me than agree with me politically. The list of "other than politics" seems to be growing everyday and it probably looks a lot like this: